School choice has big impact on budgets

School choice has big impact on budgets

By Gerry Tuoti / GateHouse News Service
Posted Jan 21, 2018 at 5:24 PM
Updated Jan 21, 2018 at 5:24 PM

Each year, millions of dollars in state funding flows from school system to school system, following students whose parents send them to a neighboring community.

In Massachusetts, a 1991 initiative known as inter-district school choice gives parents the option of enrolling their children in a public school district in a community other than their hometown. While the law lets each school district decide whether to accept out-of-district students, no district can deny its students the right to leave.

“School choice money can be a major factor in determining both the revenue you gain and the revenue you lose for many school districts,” said Glenn Koocher, executive director of the Massachusetts Association of School Committees. “Depending on where you are, districts may really depend on that money to sustain the services they’re able to provide to students ... School choice has made districts a little more competitive with each other.”

Since state funding follows the students, school choice has had the unintended consequence of widening the gap between affluent suburban districts and cash-strapped urban and rural school systems, according to some critics. When a student leaves one public school system for another, state funding goes from the sending district to the receiving district in the form of school choice tuition. To soften the blow for sending districts, the state caps school choice tuition payments at $5,000 per student.

For districts that gain and lose large numbers of school choice students, the aggregate financial impact can be large.

Opposite experiences among neighbors

In the small town of Avon, more than a quarter of all students enrolled in the public school system come from other communities on school choice. According to the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, school choice students brought more than $958,000 into Avon last fiscal year.

“The choice revenue is close to a million dollars, or about 11 percent of our budget,” Avon Superintendent Paul Zinni said. “When you’re talking about 11 percent added into your budget, that’s significant.”

Water

How to ease traffic congestion

How to ease traffic congestion
Monday, January 22, 2018




Michael Manville, an assistant professor of urban planning at UCLA, says the best way to ease congestion in Boston is to put a price on it.

In a Codcast interview with Josh Fairchild and James Aloisi of TransitMatters, Manville said our roads are clogged because we have too much demand for scarce road space at certain times of the day. We've all been there, inching along because everyone is trying to get to work or head home at the same time.






"We have traffic congestion because driving on our roads is underpriced," Manville said.
The answer is to set the price for driving at high-demand times at whatever level is needed to get some people to shift their behavior so traffic can move along at 55 miles per hour. Gas taxes, carbon taxes, even tolls don't do that -- just congestion pricing, said the UCLA professor.

Manville, who grew up in Reading and attended Holy Cross in Worcester as an undergraduate, insisted the price doesn't need to be super high, only high enough to prompt a small number of drivers to drive at a different time or to give up driving all together and shift to carpooling or public transit. A small shift is usually enough to unclog a street or a highway, he said.

It's true that congestion pricing is regressive and falls harder on the poor, but Manville says the very poorest people don't drive anyway, and the rest could receive some sort of public aid to offset the financial burden the same way they do if they have difficulty affording food or heating fuel.

BRUCE MOHL